Auto-upmod for the last living American intellectual.

Let's see if I can get this straight. A study done by big corporations to prove the are not evil is a lie but a study done by the media to prove the media is fare is gospel truth? Give me a break. Chomsky, while an intellectual, is about as far left as you can get.

I only wish I could be so delusional. While you're at it, please take my money and redistribute it to those who need it more than me.

He makes a valid point though. If the question is not "Is the media liberal or not?" and is instead "Is the media too liberal?" then there is a bias in the question.

Not sure how many times that exact question is asked of course, but in that instance, it is unquestionably biased.

"reason":

I like how you are the new right-wing-nut hitting all the sift posts.

Chomsky is NOT as left as you can get, he's damn near "liberal" in the real sense of the word. I'm far more left then he is, even on a bad day.

I don't recall any reference to "gospel truth" (as if the gospels contained truth). He is only arguing that the overwhelming evidence supports a conclusion of conservative, not liberal media bias.

The US media and government are composed primarily of conservatives (Democrats) and neocons (Republicans). Anything centrist or even soft left is simply made fun of as left-wing, while anything hard left is never even mentioned. At the same time far right-wing-nuts get their own talk-shows and TV shows and end up as president. This creates a slanted left-right scale, where the center is called the left, and the left does not exist. Reality, being generally centrist, can be accused of having a "left"/"liberal" bias, you just have to pick the right(wing) scale.

Chomsky usually has interesting things to say, too bad he puts me to sleep every time.

It's not really Chomsky's job to keep you awake. That's what entertainment like The Matrix or Fox News is supposed to.

Chomsky isn't a liberal he's an anarchist, or 'libertarian socialist' if you're in Europe.

I agree with dgandhi. Almost ANY European government would be considered radically left in American society. It's not like these "radically left" parties have ruined Europe, on the contrary it's America that's headed towards economic crises.

left right left right who cares what they stand for let's just make sure we can boil it down to 2 sides and choose one, eh guys?

qualm:

While Chomsky may be a big-tent anarchist, he is not a hard anarchist(therefor not far left). Chomsky does not believe that authority/property are fundamentally unjustifiable, only that they need justification. His views are rooted in classical liberalism, with a tiny bit of socialism thrown in. Though he is a member of the IWW it seems to be out of solidarity and not personal anarcho-syndicalism. He does not, for instance, argue against property as such, only about its distribution.

If you go through his positions you will find that they are, as I previously asserted 'damn near "liberal"' worker control of the means of production is the only significant way in which he deviates from this, and even that is not terribly far from strong liberal support of (nearly extinct)mainstream unionism, which does(did?) offer some level of worker control.

Where's Joe McCarthy when you need him?

Someone else said he was far-left, it wasn't me. While his positions may be eclectic you'd really have to do some contorting to make the case that he's a liberal. It's key to remember how the liberal worldview is uniquely situated to power; Chomsky is hardly an apologist for power.

Well, where was this "liberal media" when their liberal president was in power? Hmmm...I seem to remember the "liberal media" was publishing and reported every single lurid detail about the Monica Lewinsky affair every day and every night.

You would think that they would have buried it and protected him.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'propoganda, news, debunk, research, systematic, analysis' to 'propaganda, news, debunk, research, systematic, analysis' - edited by Fjnbk

They don't give any evidence, they just say there is evidence.
The media is a group of corporations doing anything they can for money. This does not result in the best way to educate the masses, this just results in giving people what they want. What bothers me about Chomsky always complaining about this, is that he is supposed to be somewhat of a libertarian, MEANING, he should respect that the market decides the product, not a single group or person deciding what the masses should be told. If a media organization is not giving the people what they want, then they will not last, something else would take their place. It's not the best way to educate the public, but any other way would mean there would be some asshole like Chomsky telling people exactly what they should feel.
This is why you can not complain about certain candidates not getting on the air. They are trying to put whatever is popular on the air, to receive the best ratings, judging by the polls. It's not as if the media has decided to avoid Ron Paul or Mike Gravel because of their politics, it's that they are not a good source of revenue (or for Ron Paul until recently)

"Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky..."

Ok, just stop right there. Chomsky believes some of the most incredulously stupid crap: http://www.paulbogdanor.com/100chomskylies.pdf

He's a hard-core Stalinist, right out of the 1950s. It'd be amusing, if he wasn't serious in his support for psychopaths like Pol Pot.

Naturally from his perspective, the media looks like it tilts slightly to the right.

vermeulen, just because news channels want to be entertaining doesn't mean they have to have slanted views on the issues.
I really hope The Real News takes off.

"What bothers me about Chomsky always complaining about this, is that he is supposed to be somewhat of a libertarian, MEANING, he should respect that the market decides the product..."

Wrong. He's not a libertarian in the USian sense, ie. anarcho-capitalist. The term "libertarian" has been co-opted.

Re Chomsky: on Pol Pot, etc:

http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/5/6.html

" The Pol Pot Affair

Collaborators once more, Chomsky and Edward Herman published The Political Economy of Human Rights in 1979. In the second volume of this two-volume work, After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, they compared two sites of atrocity ­ Cambodia and Timor ­ and evaluated the diverse media responses to each. It embroiled Chomsky in an entirely new controversy.

In a 7 November 1980 Times Higher Education Supplementarticle called "Chomsky's Betrayal of Truths," Steven Lukes accused Chomsky of intellectual irresponsibility. He was contributing to the "deceit and distortion surrounding Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia," Lukes charged, because, "obsessed by his opposition to the United States' role in Indochina," he had "lost all sense of perspective" (31). Lukes concluded that there was "only one possible thing to think" : Chomsky had betrayed his own anarchist-libertarian principles. "It is sad to see Chomsky writing these things. It is ironic, given the United States' government's present pursuit of its global role in supporting the seating of Pol Pot at the [United Nations]. And it is bizarre, given Chomsky's previous stand for anarchist-libertarian principles. In writing as he does about the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, Chomsky betrays not only the responsibilities of intellectuals, but himself" (31).


The Obscure History of East Timor

Lukes makes no mention here of the subject of the book, which is clearly stated in the introduction to volume 1, which is entitled "Cambodia: Why the Media Find It More Newsworthy than Indonesia and East Timor." It is an explicit comparison between Cambodia and Timor ­ the latter being the scene of the worst slaughter, relative to population size, since the Holocaust. Now if the atrocities perpetrated in Timor were comparable to those perpetrated by Pol Pot in Cambodia (and Chomsky claims that they were), then a comparison of Pol Pot's actions to those committed in Timor could not possibly constitute an apology for Pol Pot. Yet somehow Lukes suggested that it did. If such comparisons cannot be made without the intellectual community rising up in protest, then the entire issue of state-instigated murder can become lost inside the polemics of determining which team of slaughterers represents a lesser evil.

That Lukes could ignore the fact that Chomsky and Herman were comparing Pol Pot to East Timor "says a lot about him," in Chomsky's opinion:

By making no mention of the clear, unambiguous, and explicit comparison [of Pol Pot and East Timor], he is demonstrating himself to be an apologist for the crimes in Timor. That is elementary logic: if a comparison of Pol Pot to Timor is apologetics for Pol Pot, as Lukes claims (by omission of the relevant context, which he could not fail to know), then it must be that the crimes in Timor were insignificant. Lukes, then, is an apologist for the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust. Worse, that is a crime for which he, Lukes, bears responsibility; uk support has been crucial. And it is a crime that he, Lukes, could have always helped to terminate, if he did not support huge atrocities; in contrast, neither he nor anyone else had a suggestion as to what to do about Pol Pot. (13 Feb. 1996)

The vigor of Chomsky's remarks reflects the contempt that he feels for this kind of by-now-familiar tactic. Decorum must not take precedence over decrying slaughter and falsity, and Chomsky is compelled to demonstrate this: "Let us say that someone in the us or uk . . . did deny Pol Pot atrocities. That person would be a positive saint as compared to Lukes, who denies comparable atrocities for which he himself shares responsibility and knows how to bring to an end, if he chose. That's elementary. Try to find some intellectual who can understand it. That tells us a lot . . . about the intellectual culture" (13 Feb. 1996). The point of course goes beyond Lukes, and extends into a general discussion concerning the intellectual community, which itself, in Chomsky's opinion, "cannot comprehend this kind of trivial, simple, reasoning and what it implies. That really is interesting. It reveals a level of indoctrination vastly beyond what one finds in totalitarian states, which rarely were able to indoctrinate intellectuals so profoundly that they are unable to understand real trivialities" (14 Aug. 1995).

Within weeks, two long and lucid replies to Lukes's piece were sent in to the Times Higher Education Supplement, accusing him of selective reading, of missing the entire point of both volumes of Political Economy, of ignoring the first volume, of trivializing the moral potency of Chomsky's thesis, of cold-bloodedly manipulating the truth, of misrepresenting Chomsky and Herman's work, and of disrespect. Neither reply came from Chomsky; one was from Laura J. Summers, the other from Robin Woodsworth Carlsen.

Though bolstered by the support of those sympathetic to his position and his larger aims, Chomsky knew that a smear campaign could be much more effective and have a much wider dissemination than rational argumentation. In Herman's opinion,

the Cambodia and Faurisson disputes imposed a serious personal cost on Chomsky. He put up a diligent defence against the attacks and charges against him, answering virtually every letter and written criticism that came to his attention. He wrote many hundreds of letters to correspondents and editors on these topics, along with numerous articles, and answered many phone enquiries and queries in interviews. The intellectual and moral drain was severe. It is an astonishing fact, however, that he was able to weather these storms with his energies, morale, sense of humour and vigour and integrity of his political writings virtually intact. ( "Pol Pot" 609)


Cambodia today: continuing carnage

As ever, Chomsky is quick to point out that being the subject of such treatment did not make him unique. But the ferocity of the attack on him does reveal something about the power of popular media, the lengths to which endangered elites will go to eliminate dissent, and the nature of what passes for appropriate professional behavior. In a letter he wrote to the Times Literary Supplement in January of 1982 ­ a reply to an article by Paul Johnson in that same publication in which he, like Lukes, accused Chomsky and Herman of sympathizing with the Khmer Rouge ­ Chomsky examined one of the tactics used against him: "[A] standard device by which the conformist intellectuals of East or West deal with irritating dissident opinion is to try to overwhelm it with a flood of lies. Paul Johnson illustrates the technique with his reference to my `prodigies of apologetics . . . for the Khmer Rouge' (December 25). I have stated the facts before in this journal, and will do so again, not under any illusion that they will be relevant to the guardians of the faith." Chomsky asserted that the smear campaign was a side issue; the larger concern was, of course, the intellectual apologists' ability to forgo reasonable analysis when their own government was at fault:

The context was extensive documentation of how the mainstream intelligentsia suppressed or justified the crimes of their own states during the same period. This naturally outraged those who feel that they should be free to lie at will concerning the crimes of an official enemy while concealing or justifying those of their own states ­ a phenomenon that is, incidentally, far more significant and widespread than the delusions about so-called "socialist" states that Johnson discusses, and correspondingly quite generally evaded. Hence the resort to the familiar technique that Johnson, and others, adopts. ("Political Pilgrims")

Otero even goes so far as to describe (in a note he added to Language and Politics) the reaction to Chomsky's positions on Faurisson and Pol Pot as a coordinated attempt to undermine his credibility and thereby sabotage his powerful critique of policies on Indochina:

The major international campaign orchestrated against Chomsky on completely false pretexts was only part ­ though perhaps a crucial part ­ of the ambitious campaign launched in the late 70s with the hope of reconstructing the ideology of power and domination which had been partially exposed during the Indochina war. The magnitude of the insane attack against Chomsky, which aimed at silencing him and robbing him of his moral stature and his prestige and influence, is of course one more tribute to the impact of his writings and his actions ­ not for nothing he was the only one singled out. (310)

Such commentary assigns to the ruling elite a uniformity that is based on the values shared by its members. Evidence for this may be found in the heavy media coverage given to the Lukes camp and the general reluctance to allow Chomsky space for rebuttal (particularly in France)."

ahhhh the myth that the word "liberal" actually has a consistent meaning to more than 3 people at the same time.

and yes, if the media was "liberal" then there would be less lewinsky. it's fucking obvious that the "liberal" media slept while iraq burned.

vermeulen is right.. the media doesn't have a political alliance, it has a financial alliance to stuff that makes money. and it just so happens that right wing shit like outing homosexuals and killing iraqi babies makes more money, so that's what they show. And the sheeple continue to feel like they actually have their own opinion.

And still everyone hates FOX unless they show the simpsons, which they would BAN if it didn't make so much money in merchandising. Follow the money. Politics doesn't matter to the money guys.

That's an oversimplification. MSM media has discernable political slant, which isn't quite the same thing as covert political allegiance. So you're not usually going to find media in open collusion with political parties. The issue is more around setting boundaries about what is acceptable discourse and what is not.

And don't forget that the Democrats and Republicans are basically two halves of a whole.

Saying the media is liberal should just be reworded to say "given the choice, the media will side with the democratic party" with the exception of Fox News, talk radio, and the Wallstreet Journal. I read a study that found that if you do not include Fox News in the survey, only 6% of those working for the mainstream media voted for Bush in last election. During that election, on election day, the bias of each media outlet was very painfully, but very hilariously obvious. If you watched the news that day, you know what I'm talkin about. Anyway, many studies have been done simply counting the number of positive and negative stories about presidential candidates and they always show that the media (except fox) is positive toward democrats far more often than it is positive toward republicans (and the converse). Who cares if that is liberal or just center globally. It's liberal in the USA... and that's what we're talking about.

And about lewinski? Of coarse they'll eat that up on every network. Ratings! If they dodged that story, they'd lose most of their audience to networks that didn't dodge it.
And Iraq? The media has been against that war from day 1... even before day 1. They report nothing positive about it and only recently have admitted ANY advances or successes. They ridicule any politician who focuses on positive results whether they're true or not. They ignore or attempt to marginalize every positive report there is.

"everyone hates fox"
yeah, except for the overwhelmingly enormous population that doesn't. Fox News absolutely dominates the cable news ratings at basically every time slot. O'Reilly has the highest ratings of any opinion show on the news consistently. Fox routinely maintains about 6 of the top 10 news show slots in every cable news rating list. They are a juggernaut. If only because it is the only conservative leaning network in the US. All the rest have to share the dems. Fox gets the most attacks for the same reason. There is only one republican leaning station, but many dem leaning ones. Fox is outnumbered so it looks like they are attacking everyone and everyone is attacking them. If there were another right-leaning news station, it'd share the brunt of the libs' indignation.

Goofball: The reason that they didn't bury the Monica Lewinsky scandal is because they needed it to cover the lack of response by Clinton to the USS Cole bombing, the Camp David bombing, and the pardoning of Osama Bin Laden. All of which would look worse then the scandal.

Just read the BBC. That's what I do.

BBC's going to hell lately as well.

There's no liberal media?--then why do liberals pine for the days of the "Big 3" networks, when a lone old fart like Walter Commie-kite could offer his treasonous take on Vietnam without any resistance?

Conservative bias...FOX News.

Mainstream Liberal Bias: New York Slimes, St. Petersburg Slimes, Washington Compost, San Fran Carbuncle, MS-DNC, CNN (Crescent/Clinton News Network), ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, USA Hippie, Slime, Newsweak magazine, BankruptAir Amerikkka and 99% of Hollywood dreck.

Liberals: "WHAT liberal media?"
Fish: "WHAT water?"

I suppose that everything to the left of Joseph Mengele appears 'liberal' to a genocidal psychopath who consistantly calls for the incineration of 8 million innocent men, women and children - as QM does when he calls for the complete leveling of Tehran (pop: 8 million), through the use of nuclear weapons.

None of this applies to Fox News though. They're liberal.

For those that would like more insight to the myth of the liberal media, I present several books on the subject. there are of course books that look at it from the opposite angle (that the media really is liberal). I'll post about those books when the video comes up on VS.

Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media
by David Edwards (Author), David Cromwell (Author), John Pilger (Foreword)

________________________________________________

The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader
by Edward S. Herman (Author)

Book Description
The Myth of the Liberal Media contends that the mainstream media are parts of a market system and that their performance is shaped primarily by proprietor/owner and advertiser interests. Using a propaganda model, it is argued that the commercial media protect and propagandize for the corporate system. Case studies of major media institutions?the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer?are supplemented by detailed analyses of "word tricks and propaganda" and the media's treatment of topics such as Third World elections, the Persian Gulf War, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the fall of Suharto, and corporate junk science.
"Edward Herman's invaluable studies of the media in market-oriented democracies find their natural place in the broader sweep of contemporary history. Herman quotes James Madison's observation in later life that 'a popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or tragedy, or perhaps both.' The observation is apt; formal guarantees of personal freedom do not suffice to prevent the farce or the tragedy, even if the guarantees are observed. These issues, explored and illuminated in (these) essays . . ., should be at the center of the concerns of those who seek to create a society that is more free and more just." From the Preface by Noam Chomsky

__________________________________________

What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News (Paperback)
by Eric Alterman (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
The incredulity begins with the title What Liberal Media?, journalist Eric Alterman's refutation of widely flung charges of left-wing bias, and never lets up. The book is unlikely to make many friends among conservative media talking heads. Alterman picks apart charges made by Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, George Will, Sean Hannity, and others (even the subtitle refers to a popular book by former CBS producer Bernard Goldberg that argues a lefty slant in news coverage). But the perspectives of less-incendiary figures, including David Broder and Howard Kurtz, are also dissected in Alterman's quest to prove that not only do the media lack a liberal slant but that quite the opposite is true. Much of Alterman's argument comes down to this: the conservatives in the newspapers, television, talk radio, and the Republican party are lying about liberal bias and repeating the same lies long enough that they've taken on a patina of truth. Further, the perception of such a bias has cowed many media outlets into presenting more conservative opinions to counterbalance a bias, which does not, in fact, exist, says Alterman. In methodically shooting down conservative charges, Alterman employs extensive endnotes, all of which are referenced with superscript numbers throughout the body of the book. Those little numbers seem to say, "Look, I've done my homework." What Liberal Media? is a book very much of 2003 and will likely lose some relevance as political powers and media arrangements evolve. But it's likely to be a tonic for anyone who has suspected that in a media environment overflowing with conservatives, the charges of bias are hard to swallow. For liberals hoping someone will take off the gloves and mix it up with the verbal brawlers of the right, Eric Alterman is a champion.

"Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media"

I remember reading that more than 90% of people in the mainstream media voted for Clinton both times, and according to a guy above, that hasn't changed much in the last 10 years. You just can't call it a myth when they are so far out of proportion with mainstream America, which is split pretty closely. I mean, even when I was living in San Francisco, in 2004 Bush got more votes (15%) from people living there than from reporters, which I find to be pretty amazing.

When people say that the media isn't liberal, they either mean 1) Aren't more liberal than "me" (which is often very informative, 2) Or they're homing in on the fact that the MSM is a big industry, and thus on certain topics like Digital Rights Management, they'll come in on the side of business.

It bears repeating: MSM media has discernable political slant, which isn't quite the same thing as covert political allegiance. You're not usually going to find media in open collusion with political parties. The issue is more around setting boundaries about what is acceptable discourse and what is not.

It's basically trivial which ever way the majority of journalists vote on election day; what's key is that media owners have political agendas that mesh with the aims of political power and the leaders of key industries. And it needs reminding that the Democrats and Republicans are essentially two halfs of a whole.

The problem with most of the bias studies is that they are based on relative opinion polls (which, barring any of the well know methodological flaws with polls, only tells us peoples relative views), or subjective assessments of "negative" or "positive" bias in the articles (which begs the question).

The real question should be, "Which media outlets are more likely to make demonstrably untrue claims about which political party?".

We have a few studies, like http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=319 , which attempt to address the issue of bias->untruth, it's not a pure D-R scale, O'Reilly's viewers rank rather well. I'd like to see this data normalized for age/economics and correlated with the metrics of "bias" from the poll studies to get a better sense of how the political positions of journalist relates to them reporting the truth.

Doc_M you know I have a special place for you in my heart... Unfortunately, that means I am going to hold you to a higher standard.

You need to provide unbiased, published, supporting evidence to get your rebuttal some legs to stand on. Your claims are anecdotal at best (I am picking on you cause you should know better). The burden of proof is on the believer. In this case the belief is that the news media is biased.

One more comment: I am not sure how much they prove here one way or the other. They mention no data or citations, and merely state that there is research that supports their opinion.

That is all.

PS. Snipe, you are my hero.

I try my best mycrofthomlz

I'm pretty sure the research and citations would be mentioned in the books.